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Fairfield University professor named to national board

Angela Kim Harkins, Ph.D., of Fairfield, Conn., associate professor of religious studies at Fairfield University, has been elected to a four-year term on the national board of the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts.

Dr. Harkins, who joined the Fairfield University faculty in 2006, teaches in the Department of Religious Studies and for the University's Carl and Dorothy Bennett Center for Judaic Studies. She is a member of the National Jesuit Advisory Board on Interreligious Dialogue and Relations and has been Fairfield's Lilly Program campus representative since 2008.

Dr. Harkins holds a B.A. in theology, magna cum laude, from Loyola University of Chicago and completed her M.A. in theology at the University of Notre Dame with a concentration in biblical languages. She spent a Fulbright year at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, in 1997-1998 and then completed her Ph.D. in theology at the University of Notre Dame in 2003.

Dr. Harkins is the co-chair of the Religious Experience in Early Judaism and Early Christianity section of the Society of Biblical Literature. Her monograph on religious experience and the Qumran Hodayot is entitled "Reading with an 'I' to the Heavens." It appeared in 2012 in the series Ekstasis: Religious Experience from Antiquity to the Middle Ages published by de Gruyter Press in Berlin. Her current research is on the ancient pseudepigraphic collection known as the Odes of Solomon.

Founded in 1991, the Lilly Fellows Program seeks to strengthen the quality and shape the character of church-related institutions of learning through three initiatives. Firstly, it offers an extremely competitive two-year postdoctoral teaching fellowships to young scholars who wish to prepare themselves for positions of teaching, scholarship, and leadership within church-related institutions. Secondly, the Lilly Graduate Fellows Program offers mentoring and support for exceptionally talented young men and women who are preparing for a career of teaching at the college or university level. Finally, its National Network of Church-Related Colleges and Universities sponsors various grants and other initiatives that explore the nature of mission and identity in higher education today.

The national network represents 100 schools of diverse denominations and traditions. The Lilly Fellows Program is based at Christ College, the interdisciplinary honors college of Valparaiso University in Northwest Indiana. Fairfield University has been a member since 2005.